Opinion
Sure, prepping the same meal to reheat and eat night after night may make life simpler, but it’s also sucking the joy out of, well, everything.
“Every day is just okay”, sighed my Uber driver with a shrug of resignation when I asked her how her day was going. “It’s the algorithm,” she offered. “Every day is the same.”
She explained that if she has already had a lot of jobs, the Uber algorithm responsible for assigning rides sends new jobs to someone else. If she doesn’t have enough, the algorithm might send her a few more. No highs, no lows. Just endless okay-ness, in service of a computer program.
In food, a symptom of this modern malaise is the rise of “meal prep”.
It’s not entirely new. At university I had a friend who made a big batch of spaghetti bolognese every couple of weeks and ate spaghetti bolognese every single night for years. Back then, that wasn’t considered aspirational.
These days, meal prep is organised in individual portions of social media-friendly uniformity. The meals themselves are often so nutritionally benign and emotionless they may as well have been cooked by ChatGPT. Overnight oats with miscellaneous fruits. Dry chicken breast with roast sweet potato and green beans. Brown rice, quinoa and flaccid noodle salads lined up in identical jars.
Inoffensive in design, generic in execution. But as content, it’s intended to signify that the maker has their life in order.
It’s existentially bleak, but I kinda get it.
Today’s world is expensive, fast and complicated, 200 different restaurants will deliver directly to your door, work emails from around the world ping long into the night, and 20 different streaming services can send you more hours of content than you could ever consume in your lifetime. Although, you can’t ever decide what to watch, so you stare at your phone instead.
Modern life asks humans to operate at the pace of machines, so it’s no wonder people want to simplify their lives wherever they can.
A week’s worth of identical meals in the fridge might feel like a win against the system, but might it be just accepting that the system has sucked the spontaneity and humanity from life?
Meal prep can look like a neat solution. A whole week where you no longer have to think about what to eat, how much to eat, how much it costs, or whether it’s going to be good for you. Just take a single food unit out of the fridge and stick it in the microwave.
Food was once celebrated. Google the origins of most of our holidays. They can be traced back to occasions of seasonal change, harvest or hunting, where food was synonymous with prosperity. Before Christianity, Easter celebrated the start of the abundance of spring.
Abundance has been aspirational for a long time, but its aesthetic in culture is constantly changing.
For hunter-gatherers, abundance looked like rock art of a successful hunt. In agricultural times, it was bushels of wheat or images of laden fruit trees. Today when most of us have never hunted our own meat or harvested a vegetable, the aesthetic of abundance can be an Instagram tour of a home pantry that looks like a supermarket, or a fridge full of individual portions of meal prep.
The Greek philosopher Epicurus is often wrongly invoked to describe the “epicurean” hedonistic pleasures of food. In fact, Epicurus’ definition of happiness wasn’t indulgence, it was the tranquillity that results from the removal of fear and pain. If a week’s worth of meals in the fridge saves money, encourages you to cook, and removes the anxiety of deciding what and how to eat, where’s the foul?
Well, there isn’t one. But where I bristle against meal prep is that if I felt like my whole life was becoming automatic and mechanical (which I do), the last thing I’d want to do is to start eating like a machine.
When I was living alone, I “meal prepped” every week, but instead of “meals” I just “prepped”.
On Sundays, I’d make a batch of stock for soups, slice a week’s worth of vegetables and marinade meats. Each night after work I’d assemble a simple bowl of soup, stir-fry, or plate of pasta, and every night was something different.
Sure, some days I ate raw veg straight from the fridge before falling into bed, but at least it felt like free will.
A week’s worth of identical meals in the fridge might feel like a win against the system, but might it be just accepting that the system has sucked the spontaneity and humanity from life? And in return for what? Extra hours at the office and doomscrolling?
If meal prep solves your problems and brings you Epicurean tranquillity, please don’t let me stop you. It’s tough out there these days, and we’ve got to get by any way we can.
But you might get to Easter wondering where the first three months of the year went. Time certainly flies when every day tastes the same.
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Adam Liaw is a cookbook author and food writer, co-host of Good Food Kitchen and former MasterChef winner.
